The Muslim mainstream slam is growing fast
in America, and its members defy stereotypes

BY JONAH BLANK

In the polished wooden pews of a white-steepled
New England church, the weekend congregants sit
with heads reverently bowed. The town of
Chelmsford, Mass., is Yankee to the core, and so
are most of its inhabitants. Like the sober,
strait-laced Pilgrims 300 years before them, the
worshipers here shun liquor, dress modestly, and
feel uplifted when they call out, "God is great!"
Unlike their Puritan predecessors, however, those
gathered here address their Maker in Arabic:
"Allah-u Akhbar!" they chant, in a call offered five
times each day by Muslims from Maine to Alaska.

Five to 6 million strong, Muslims in America already
outnumber Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and
Mormons, and they are more numerous than
Quakers, Unitarians, Seventh-day Adventists,
Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian
Scientists, combined. Many demographers say
Islam has overtaken Judaism as the country's
second-most commonly practiced religion; others
say it is in the passing lane.

Yet while Muslims make up one of the
fastest-growing religious groups, largely because of
immigration, they are among those least
understood by their neighbors. Over half the
respondents to a recent Roper poll described Islam
as inherently anti-American, anti-Western, or
supportive of terrorism--though only 5 percent of
those surveyed said they'd had much contact with
Muslims personally. And according to a draft report
scheduled to be released this week by the Council
on American-Islamic Relations, although the
incidence of violence and harassment directed at
Muslims declined 58 percent last year,
discrimination reports increased 60 percent.

In part, such statistics reflect attitudes shaped by
Muslims who live across the globe rather than
those who live across the street. Militant
fundamentalists such as the late Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran (and a tiny minority of
American Muslims) come from an extreme wing,
rather than the more moderate center of the world's
1 billion Muslims. But TV cameras and international
showdowns raise the militants' public profile. They
overshadow the mass of American Muslims, who
tend to vote Democratic on issues like immigration
and affirmative action, veer Republican on
"traditional family values," including such topics as
abortion and sex education, and live comfortably
within the mainstream of society.

The statistics also suggest that the United States
must wrestle with a question that has challenged
France, Germany, and other European nations as
their Muslim populations have grown: Is America a
nation based on Judeo-Christian values or on
something more universal? Do we value cultural
diversity, or merely tolerate it? As the country
begins thinking about how the expanding Muslim
population might change the nation's sense of itself,
the challenge will be to see Islam as it really is,
rather than as people wish or fear.

One of the most widespread misconceptions about
Muslims here or abroad is that they are primarily
Middle Eastern. Fewer than 1 out of 8 American
Muslims (12.4 percent) are of Arab descent; other
Middle Eastern groups like Iranians and Turks
account for only a few additional percentage points
each. On a global basis, there are about 100 million
more Muslims on the Indian subcontinent alone
than in all Arab countries combined. The two
largest Muslim groups in the United States are
native-born African-Americans (42 percent) and
immigrants from South Asia (24 percent).

America's polyglot neighborhoods are home to
Muslims of every conceivable background: Malays
from Southeast Asia and Bosnians from southeast
Europe, Songhai from the Sahara desert and
Uighars from the Taklimakan desert. America is
seldom so truly a melting pot as in her mosques.
There is even a mosque on a Navajo reservation in
New Mexico: Islam has a small but long-standing
presence among Native American communities
from the Plains to the pueblos.

Islam, which stresses egalitarianism, has a special
appeal for the marginalized, but the faith draws
many converts from the white middle class: More
than 80,000 of America's Muslims are of West
European background. When Mariam Agah (nee
Mary Froelich) started questioning the faith of her
birth, she was not only white and middle class--she
was a Roman Catholic nun. At the age of 25, after
seven years as Sister Frederick, she gave up her
habit: "I was not convinced that Jesus was divine,"
she says, "and that's when I realized that I needed
to leave."

That was 28 years ago. Agah got a job at an
elementary school, and for a long time she taught
and she thought. She read her way through many
bookshelves of philosophy, and two works stood
out: the Koran and the Autobiography of Malcolm
X. "I continued my spiritual journey," she says,
"and it led me to Islam."

Jim Bates is another unlikely convert. In 1990, after
four terms as a Democratic congressman from San
Diego, he lost an election--and also lost his
marriage, his home, and his sense of direction.
Born and baptized a Catholic, raised Protestant in a
series of orphanages and foster homes, then a
loose follower of Unitarianism for most of his adult
life, at age 50 Bates found himself searching, he
says, for a truth that would never slip away. He
found it through the faith of Pakistani-American
friends he'd made during his tenure in Congress.
Now Bates spends much of his time consulting,
and the rest farming hay and raising quarter horses
on a ranch in Idaho.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, with his inflammatory
racial comments, may be the Muslim leader most
familiar to Americans. But he commands the
allegiance of only a fraction even of
African-American Muslims. His Nation of Islam
today boasts only 20,000 to 50,000 members, says
Prof. Sulayman Nyang of Howard University. The
charismatic Farrakhan can attract huge crowds, as
the Million Man March demonstrated, but few of
those in attendance actually convert.

Instead, the man who attracts the greatest following
among American Muslims--black, white, or
Asian--is a moderate who has left behind the
divisive doctrines Farrakhan upholds. Warith Deen
Mohammed, an imam--leader of prayer--and the son
and successor of the black separatist Elijah
Muhammad, has up to half a million solid
supporters, and perhaps 1.5 million followers more
loosely affiliated. He has championed unity among
Muslims of different races and made significant
headway, though desegregation is still a work in
progress. Two decades ago, he led most of his
father's radical Black Muslim flock into the
mainstream of moderate Islam, and into the
mainstream of everyday American life. "I've become
almost a fanatical supporter of the United States
government," he told U.S. News. "To me, the vision
of the Founding Fathers is the vision that we have in
Islam."

Shedding the past. Only a few months after the
death of his father in 1975, Imam Warith shocked
the faithful by renouncing many of the key tenets
preached by Elijah Muhammad. Racially
exclusionary rhetoric was jettisoned, as was the
proposition that whites were "blue-eyed devils"
created by an evil scientist named Yacub as a
laboratory experiment. Imam Warith tossed out
core Nation of Islam doctrines that are viewed as
heresy by the rest of the Muslim world: for
example, the belief that movement founder Wallace
Fard was a manifestation of God and that Elijah
Muhammad was his prophet. "He was like Dr.
Frankenstein," Imam Warith (born Wallace) says of
his namesake. "He picked up some dead pieces
here and some dead pieces there, put them all
together, and breathed life into the creature."

In 1985 Imam Warith disbanded the Nation of Islam
altogether, urging his supporters to attend any
mosque they wished without regard to the race of
the other congregants. Several splinter factions had
already broken away: One was led by Farrakhan,
who re-established the old Nation and resurrected
almost all of Elijah Muhammad's doctrines.

Wali Mutazammil, who had served as the Nation of
Islam's minister for public relations in Kansas City,
Mo., remembers setting aside his initial reluctance
and rejoining American society. A boxer who'd been
the Marine Corps champion featherweight of 1970,
Mutazammil had been drawn to the old Nation of
Islam partly by the example of boxing legend (and
Nation spokesman) Muhammad Ali. In 1976
Mutazammil and the rest of his Missouri
congregation followed Imam Warith's invitation to
enter the mainstream Muslim fold. Having already
studied some of the texts of orthodox Islam, he
says, he was glad to be part of a worldwide
community. Now Mutazammil runs a management
consultant firm with business stretching from East
Asia to West Africa. Three-time world heavyweight
champ Muhammad Ali also renounced the old
Nation theology in the late 1970s.

Westerners tend to regard Muslim attitudes toward
women as inherently discriminatory, but reality
often differs from the stereotype here as well. "In
the name of Islam, cultural habits have developed
that suppress women," notes Laila Al-Marayati,
"and this needs to be dealt with head-on." Born,
raised, and still living in Los Angeles, Al-Marayati is
a physician and past president of the Muslim
Women's League. Throughout the Muslim world,
she notes, women are denied equal rights of
marriage, divorce, and property. But such
discrimination, she and many other Muslims argue,
is a betrayal rather than a reflection of the true spirit
of the faith: "The challenge is to let Islam become a
tool for elevating women rather than for oppressing
them." The Dawoodi Bohras, a group of 1 million
Shiite Muslims spread throughout the world, seem
to meet this challenge. "It's a very matriarchal
community," says Shamim Dahod, an Andover,
Mass., physician. She notes that every Bohra
family in her New England congregation is a
dual-career household and says she has
experienced much greater sexism in her last
hospital posting than she has in any mosque.

Harsh image. Perhaps the most persistent
negative stereotype of Islam is that it is a faith of
violent extremists, represented by a masked
militant rather than the doctor or computer software
designer living next door. It is a stereotype that
stings: Muslims in America say they are more
likely to be the victims of crime than the
perpetrators. In a sense, American Muslims (many
of them refugees from the regimes with which they
are associated in the public mind) are held hostage
to the behavior of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah:
Anti-Muslim violence in the United States rises
sharply when tensions peak in the Middle East.

Sgt. George Curtis feels a special pride in having
defended the holy sites of Mecca and Medina from
the forces of Iraq. He is the commander of an M1A1
Abrams tank at Fort Carson, Colo., a veteran of the
gulf war, and also one of the 10,000 Muslims
serving in the U.S. military. He sees no
contradiction in his roles, noting that the Army has
provided special "halal" meals for him and has
relieved him of daily physical training requirements
during the fast of Ramadan. "Whether it's Iraq or
anywhere else in the world," he says, "my first duty
is to defend my country."

At a mall in Chantilly, Va., last January, all sides of
American Islam were on display. It was Eid-ul Fitr,
the festival that ends the fasting month of
Ramadan, and the crowd in attendance was as
multifaceted as any other mass of 15,000 people
one could find. The prayer leader delivered his
sermon in English--the only language virtually
everyone present could understand. Somali
immigrants in white robes and loosely coiled
turbans rubbed shoulders with Philadelphia B-boyz
in Kangol hats, Lugz jackets, and hip-sagging
Tommy Hilfiger jeans. Chador-clad mothers bought
their kids pink cotton candy and tried not to worry
about the competence of the carnies wearily
operating the miniature merry-go-round and the
ferris wheel. The longest lines were for a gyroscope
ride: Teenagers with scraggly beards and decorous
skullcaps were strapped in place, and they grinned
wildly as their world spun around and around. For
these kids and their friends and classmates, it was
just another all-American day at the mall.